How to get 140,000 young people a year into the hospitality industry

How did you learn about food and cooking at school? If you’re a child of the 1980s like me, you probably have vague memories of making pineapple upside-down pudding in home economics. Or maybe that’s just me – I only remember it because I used a tablespoon of baking powder instead of a teaspoon and spent my lunch hour scraping burnt cake off the sides of the oven.

However, I do remember Shane, a lad in my year who brazened out the substantial amount of abuse that he got for being a 15-year old boy that wanted to cook in a comprehensive school. Last I heard he was an army chef, so he clearly got more out of the lessons than I did.

But thanks to Jamie Oliver and co, cooking has become much cooler than it was in 1988. And this is great news, because recruiting motivated staff is a major challenge for every restaurant and hospitality operator, as we saw when we put our Essential Guide to Running a Restaurant book together with Restaurant magazine.

The question, however, is who is linking the two together? Who is connecting the dots so that kids at schools in all areas of the UK can see Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson on TV and understand that there’s a whole connected industry out there for them to explore as a very viable career option?

Last month I travelled to America where I got to see a program called ProStart in action, and I was blown away by the life-changing opportunities that it offers to kids. ProStart was created by the National Restaurant Association (NRA) in the US about 15 years ago and is an education program that high schools and technical colleges can follow, teaching kids about food and hospitality management.

The program is supported in each state by the local restaurant association and each year over 140,000 kids take part. It attracts a wide variety of students – some have dreamt for years of a career as a chef or restaurant owner or hotelier, others have no interest in school and are possibly on the verge of dropping out when they see a ProStart poster offering food, so they decide to give it a go.

And that’s impressive – giving 140,000 children a way into an industry that desperately needs them is a hugely positive achievement in itself. But then comes the truly life-changing bit.

Every year the NRA’s Education Foundation runs a national competition, inviting each state to put forward two teams of students – one team competes in a culinary contest, the other creates a restaurant concept that they pitch to a panel of judges.

To get to Nationals, each team must win the regional contest held by the state’s restaurant association. The winning teams then go forwards to the Nationals, where kids from 42 states gather to compete. For two days in Dallas this year, teams of students either cooked three-course meals, or pitched their restaurant concepts to a panel of industry expert judges, being questioned on aspects such as their menu, marketing, technology use and location.

The stakes were high. The top five teams in both culinary and management got substantial scholarships to college. For around 40 students, the event was life-changing – they’re not only getting direction in life, but the financial means to follow that direction as well.

One of the parents from the New York team told me that it wasn’t about the winning; “The kids are winners just by getting here to Nationals,” he said. “I tell my son, you’re a winner whatever happens”.

The scholarships are funded by the NRA, culinary colleges and restaurant groups. The event is a great recruitment opportunity for the restaurant operators, bringing together the best young hospitality talent in the country as it does.

But it’s not all about money and scholarships. Oracle Food and Beverage was proud to be a sponsor of the competition this year and I was lucky enough to sit in on many of the presentations. I’m rarely stuck for words, but some of the things I saw left me speechless. There was a young man – probably 16 – who saw his teammate struggling during her presentation and subtly put a steady hand on her shoulder to give her support. There was the team who had been meeting up every day at 7am for weeks to go over their concept - “we’re like family now” one of them said. The skills that the teams are learning – teamwork, discipline, creative thinking – are skills that are useful in any career or walk of life.

The restaurant industry is about more than just being able to cook, it’s about the business of hospitality. While TV chefs successfully promote the cooking side to young people there’s much more that can be done to encourage more youngsters to see the wider picture of hospitality. With the UK currently suffering a shortage of staff across many aspects of the eating out sector, maybe it’s time we look to America and Prostart for inspiration as to what can be done over here.